Marketing Mandates

Posted by Shantanu Narayen, President and CEO on March 19, 2013

The best part of my job is hitting the road to hear about what’s on the minds of our customers, partners and employees. In the past two months I’ve clocked more than 34,000 air miles doing just that. From the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to the World Economic Forum in Davos, from London to Sydney to New York, Digital Marketing has been on the mind of every CEO I meet. It has definitely gone broadly into the mainstream and into the boardroom, well beyond the confines of the web team.

Most recently, we had three terrific days in Utah at the annual Adobe Digital Marketing Summit where 5,000 people gathered to hear about the latest innovations in digital marketing solutions. Every company needs to become a digital-first organization and I spoke about the three marketing mandates that I believe all companies need to focus on:

1) Engage everywhere – Gone are the days when your digital strategy is just about driving customers to your website and converting them. Whether it’s app stores or retail stores; on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest; on a PC, phone, or laptop; you have to go to your customers or they won’t come to you. Successful marketers are integrating all channels to engage their customers wherever they are.

2) Embrace rocket science – Every business is swimming in data, and many are struggling just to get backward-looking reports. But the real value of data is predictive, harnessing math and machine learning to take marketers’ intuition to a whole new level. Many of our customers are already doing this with Media Optimizer today, where you can predict the optimal media mix and automate the buying across display and search advertising. The next frontier is to take all of your marketing – across social, mobile, web, real-time, historic, qualitative, quantitative – and reliably predict and execute the perfect campaign to maximize sales. That is rocket science becoming real.

3) Connect the dots – Organizational change needs to happen internal to every company in order to thrive in this new digital age. I live this every Monday morning at 9 am when I have the team report to me on their metrics. The product organization, marketing organization and sales and finance are working together to drive the results in a way that never used to happen.

Thanks to everyone who made Summit such a great event. Next up: Adobe MAX in LA. I’m excited to hear what our community has to say about the future of creativity!